This course explores the brain bases of bilingualism by discussing literature relevant to differences in age of initial learning, proficiency, and control in the nonverbal, single language and dual-language literature. Participants will learn about the latest research related to how humans learn one or two languages and other cognitive skills.

Enseigné par

Arturo E. Hernandez

Professor

Transcription

[SOUND] In the next section of the course we're going to talk about the idea of deliberate practice within the domain of language. The idea of deliberate practice is we discussed earlier, was centered on this notion that people who become experts spend time practicing more deeply with a lot of feedback and a lot of information about what they're doing correctly and incorrectly. In the domain of language and language development, there is a lot of debate about whether adults actually actively train their children, or the ones that are being taken care of, in some specific way to help them learn language. And I wouldn't want to argue that a very young infant is actually consciously processing language. However, we can talk about the way adults structure language. Within most middle class industrialized societies, adults from higher socioeconomic status tend to speak to children very specific ways. They tailor their speech generally speaking towards words, and they try to produce words in what's considered mother ease. Right, very slow, deliberate speech. Things like, look, look at the doggie. You'll hear sometimes caretakers, adults talk to children that way. The idea is to single out the importance of the doggie and so hence, look at the doggie. And that helps the child to realize that the doggie is the furry creature that's walking in front of them. Now not all societies do this when they speak to children. In some societies children or very young infants are carried on, on the back, right, with no direct visual contact with the adult caretaker. Within lower socio-economic classes, within industrialized societies, children are oftentimes given directives. They're told to do specific things in specific ways. And the purpose of speech is not really to elaborate or to discuss, but rather to direct. The qualitative differences in speech can also be seen in quantitive measures. So Hardin Riley in a very classic study looked at the number of words that were present in the environments of children that differed across socioeconomic classes in the United States. What they found was that those from high socioeconomic status received about 215,000 words in their environment within the speech samples that Hardin Riley collected. Those from middle socioeconomic status families received about 125,000 words within that speech sample. And those from low socioeconomic status received 62,000 words, roughly, within that same speech sample. These, of course, were speech samples taken for time, equated on time. And so what they indicate is that the number of words that a child hears within his or her environment, varies radically across these different levels of socioeconomic status. And as I indicated earlier, it also varies qualitatively. Hardin Riley also observed that children from lower socioeconomic status families tended to hear more directives, and those from higher socioeconomic status families tended to hear more elaborative and discussion oriented type of language. So the type of language that children are hearing in the home varies tremendously across these different socioeconomic status families. These differences continue up until adulthood. If we look at work from Eric Pakulak and Helen Neville, they investigated what the brain signatures were of adults who vary in socioeconomic status. They asked them to listen to a series of sentences, and they found that in adults who came from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds, there was more diffused EEG in the brain. Now interestingly, this correlation between the brain EEG and socioeconomic status wasn't quite as strong as they had predicted it would be. But when they began to control for things like number of hours spent reading, how much time they wrote and they spent doing literate type of activities that relationship began to increase. And what they found, in fact, was much more clear late anterior negativities for those from higher socioeconomic status. And, they found more diffuse types of EEG waves for those from low socioeconomic status families. The importance of socioeconomic status is not lost upon educational researchers. Laura Justice, for example, in several studies, has looked at the effects of literacy programs on children from lower socioeconomic statuses has found that, in fact, those children who are exposed to more literacy programs, in the preschool age range, begin to show gains in vocabulary, and begin to show gains in their literate language. Of course, these gains are lost quickly if children no longer attend. So, there are things that can be done within the educational system to alleviate or help those who do not receive as rich language input within the home. So what are the characteristics of expertise? What makes someone different when they're good at doing something? Well, one of the aspects that we can think about is that an, and oftentimes you'll hear things like this that seem so effortless, it seems that that person is not even having to work at all to do what they're doing. When I was in graduate school one of the graduate students at the time, one of my colleagues would make a joke that my doctoral adviser Elizabeth Bates could give a talk even if we took all of the overhead slides. So in that time the people used these transparencies they would put on an overhead, and they would flash it up overhead. And the joke was by Dan Haren and was that, in fact, if he just jumbled them all up in some random order that made no sense to anybody, she would still be able to give a perfectly coherent lecture. And I think that explains and summarizes to some extent what people from the outside view as an expert doing. It's just amazing, it seems effortless, and it did to us in graduate school when we thought about our adviser. She seemed to be able to talk and discuss so many different issues and flow from one to the other so well that to us it seemed effortless. But in fact there are things that all of us can do. Those of us, at least, who have the ability to walk. So, I ask people, for example, in my class often, imagine that an alien were coming down from up above to visit us. And the alien arrives and inhabits a human body. And, alien is here, standing up and says, please earthling, can you teach me how to walk? And so, oftentimes I'll ask people in my class to tell me, what would you tell them? What would you tell this alien to do? And people will answer different things. The answers from students generally tend to run in several directions. The most common one is, well, okay, just put one foot in front of the other. At which point, I will do something like this. [SOUND] Students oftentimes, when I say that, they say, well, that's not really walking. So, why don't you do it a little softer? [SOUND] And they'll sit there and they'll say, well, that's not really, I mean, that'll work. But that's not really walking. And so, after a while, they'll think about it, and they'll think about it, and they'll say, I don't know, I don't know how to explain to this alien how to walk the way we walk. And what I explain to them then is, well, there's one key element to walking you haven't thought about. That makes it more natural. And that is heel to toe. So whenever somebody walks more naturally, they go heel to toe. And now when I do heel to toe, they realize oh, that's much more naturalistic. So you see, the issue is that for the vast majority of the world, they walk everyday. And these types of actions that one performs on a daily basis, whether they be walking or whatever other action people may perform, they become fairly automatic. And people begin to lose track of the fact that you can break them up into pieces and it becomes very difficult for them to articulate what those pieces are. Hence, walking becomes something like take and put one foot in front of each foot, and in fact it's a bit more complex than that. And there's some specific aspects to walking, which people disregard because it's so common for them to do it. Again, as I noted earlier, this can happen for anything that people do. And in fact, studies of motor skill learning have found that as we discussed in earlier sections, experts have a particular difficulty in trying to break up a motor chunk into its pieces.